“What we ended up building out was a 40-person organic marketing organization … starting with content as the place to move the needle.” That’s how Mallory Russell describes her journey at Square, where she grew a solo blog into an enterprise content engine. Her story shows what’s possible when you rethink search across every algorithm, from Google to TikTok to AI.
Mallory Russell turned Square’s single blog into a channel-agnostic engine. Under her leadership, the team expanded to editorial, web, social, and “organic discovery” on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and AI tools. She believes that content should be strategic, measured, and connect every go-to-market effort. Big programs start small, then grow into reports, webinars, and sales assets.
Mallory asks marketers to rethink attribution: “Content is not a channel; it fuels many channels.” She recommends measuring what matters, even if that means rebuilding systems. She treats generative AI as a time-saver, not a content factory. At Square, her team kept a living library, slicing big pieces into audience-specific clips while editors guarded quality. This approach leads to content that travels farther and earns trust.
With over 15 years of shaping content for top brands, Mallory Russell knows how to turn stories into growth. During her eight-year run at Square, she transformed a one-person blog into a 40-person global team spanning editorial, SEO, social, and web strategy. In addition to building systems, she fostered a proactive, audience-first work culture that drove steady organic growth and deep brand loyalty at scale.
Mallory understands both the creative and operational sides of enterprise content. She launched award-winning programs like “The Bottom Line” and “Running a Restaurant Is No Joke.” By prioritizing audience insight over volume, she pushes teams to spot trends early, break silos, keep quality high at scale, and stay steady in shifting channels.
Mallory’s approach to building an enterprise content engine is bold but practical. She focuses on scale, testing, and knowing how content fits into the bigger marketing picture. Here are some key insights from her conversation:
This shows the size and ambition of Mallory’s team. By putting content at the center of a 40-person group, she proves that organic growth is not a side project. It’s a core engine for enterprise growth. This level of investment tells leaders and peers that content drives business results, not just supports them.
Mallory explains a key change: moving from traditional SEO to “Organic Discovery.” This shift recognizes that algorithms now decide what people see on many platforms, not just Google. Marketers need to adjust their strategies for a world where content shows up across many algorithm-driven ecosystems, including new AI tools.
Mallory shares her method for launching big content projects in cautious environments. Start small, prove value, and then scale. This lowers risk, builds trust with stakeholders, and makes it easier to get more investment later. It’s a smart way to handle enterprise politics and keep programs growing.
One research report became a multi-channel platform. Mallory’s team turned that single asset into a suite of reports, events, and campaigns, creating a model for turning flagship content into a long-term growth engine across the company.
Mallory challenges the usual thinking about content analytics. She says content shouldn’t be treated as just another channel. Instead, measure how content powers and amplifies other channels. This helps teams see the true impact of content across the business.
With so much content online, Mallory sets a high bar for quality. She sees generative AI as a way to work more efficiently, not to create more content. Her team focuses on producing content that serves a clear purpose and stands out.
Mallory predicts a big change in how content gets discovered. In AI-driven search, you don’t aim for rankings. You want to earn mentions by building authority and trust. This makes thought leadership and brand authority even more important for organic discovery.
Mallory’s method for aligning creative, demand generation, and content teams starts with strong briefs and close teamwork. It leads to high-impact, top-of-funnel projects that also drive pipeline. This proves that alignment and process unlock big, brand-building moves in the enterprise.
This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.
Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they've learned along the way.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Square / Block Inc.: The fintech company where Mallory built and led a 40-person organic marketing organization, shaping the enterprise content engine discussed in the episode.
Future of Commerce: Square’s annual research report that has grown into a multi-format content platform and a key part of their content strategy.
The Bottom Line: Square’s branded publication that replaced the original Town Square blog, focusing on actionable insights for business owners.
The Way Up (with Guy Raz): A video-podcast series from Square featuring entrepreneurs’ growth stories, hosted by Guy Raz.
Running a Restaurant Is No Joke (with Eric Wareheim): Comedy-infused content series aimed at restaurant owners, starring Eric Wareheim.MalloryARussell.com: Mallory’s personal website, featuring her portfolio and information on consulting and fractional work.
Follow Mallory Russell on LinkedIn.
Mallory Russell [00:00:00]:
I think there's too much content in the world. It's very easy for content teams to get pushed into producing more content that has no distribution, that has no real value to the brand. When we produce content, it has to be really purposeful. And if we're going to use these new tools to do that, that has to be really purposeful too.
Ty Magnin [00:00:18]:
Welcome to the Animals podcast. I'm Ty Magnin. And I'm Tim S. This season on the Animals podcast, we're pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the do work. Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS, sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they learned along the way. Today we're sitting down with Mallory Russell. She's the former VP of Global Integrated Content Marketing and Strategy at Square. Mallory just wrapped up eight and a half years at Square.
Ty Magnin [00:00:53]:
Quite a run. Throughout Mallory's tenure, she's launched many notable content initiatives for Square, including their news hub called the Bottom Line, that's won some awards. She's also launched a video series with Guy Raz featuring different entrepreneurs in their journey. Mallory shares a ton of lessons along her way. I learned a ton in our conversation and I hope you do enjoy. Mallory, thanks so much for joining us in the Animals podcast. Two questions for you. One, can you give your intro to our audience that maybe doesn't know you yet? And then two, what content are you consuming these days?
Mallory Russell [00:01:31]:
Sure. I'm Mallory. I live in San Francisco. I am a content marketer. I've worked at, I worked at Square for like eight and a half years building up the content program there. Before that I was with some other brands, Both on the B2C and B2B side. I was a reporter before that and worked in ad agencies. So I've had a kind of varied career path and worked across all sorts of industries.
Mallory Russell [00:01:53]:
But I love content. I call myself a content nerd. What I'm consuming right now, Such a great question. I have found myself one going back to things that are really familiar to me and I think there's a lot of studies about people kind of consuming the same things over and over. It's a way to make them feel probably safe and in control. You know, I'm in the midst of like a move and there's a lot of things happening in the world. So I have just been rewatching Parks and Recreation, which is like one of my all time favorite shows. We Laugh out loud.
Mallory Russell [00:02:22]:
Which like very few things do.
Ty Magnin [00:02:24]:
Well, you've been on a hell of a journey. I mean, obviously we can go all the way back to like journalism and your background where it all started. But I want to talk about eight years at Square. I mean, what a run. Can you paint a picture of us for us, of what it was like when you first started and then what is it like, you know, in May of 2025?
Mallory Russell [00:02:43]:
Yeah, yeah. Eight, eight and a half years at Square, I mean like at any tech company is a really long time. A lot of tech people that work in tech kind of move every couple years. But I, I stayed there for quite a long time because of just like what a unique environment, what it was, and how I was able to kind of learn and grow. So when I started there, I was an ic. I was the editor in chief. I was the only person doing full time editorial work. Um, and I ran the Town Square blog, which was Square's blog.
Mallory Russell [00:03:10]:
It was kind of a smattering of different kinds of content focused on acquisition, but also a lot of, kind of upsell to existing customers. A very different content time in terms of what the Playbook looked like. But it was, you know, the blog had like product announcements and feature updates, but also like, you know, 10 things to do for Valentine's Day, like that kind of stuff. Listicles started there. Team of one, but also like working within a larger team that included like a brand person. Everything was a single person. Yeah, social person, database marketing specialist and 3.3seos. Because we did a lot of work in the early days in terms of organic visibility and, and opening up that as.
Mallory Russell [00:03:50]:
As a channel.
Tim Metz [00:03:51]:
Do you have a picture of how big Square was then compared to now? Like also the overall company? So we can kind of feel the.
Mallory Russell [00:03:56]:
Growth from like, I think it was about 1200 people.
Ty Magnin [00:03:59]:
1200? You guys IPO'd in like 2020, sorry, 2015, is that roughly correct?
Mallory Russell [00:04:04]:
Yeah, and I started in 2016, so.
Ty Magnin [00:04:07]:
Okay. Yeah, yeah. So like a smaller public company, right? Thousand people.
Mallory Russell [00:04:10]:
Yeah. I built up, then I built up the editorial team and you know, got moved into different parts of the organization, as happens with content folks. And then about 2019, the person who had been running database marketing, he left and they decided to combine that team with mine and have me lead it because I did have a background in kind of lead gen marketing. And when we did that, we created this kind of bigger content marketing Org. It wasn't solely editorial, it was editorial content strategy and then database. But we changed into lead generation to be a bit more purposeful about how we were going out and generating leads for the sales team. And then from there social came in. The SEO team came in to my organization.
Mallory Russell [00:04:58]:
Ultimately I raised my hand to start a web strategy team. Web strategy had existed years before at Square and then had kind of disappeared a bit. Felt really passionately that we needed strategists thinking about how the web was supporting marketing's business goals, which were really important to the company overall. So what ended up building out was a 40 person organic marketing organization. Again, like really focused on organic owned channels and kind of starting with content as, as the place to kind of move the needle.
Ty Magnin [00:05:34]:
Got you. And so within this 40 person team. Okay, also how many people are at Square now? Or like as of a month ago, Block Inc.
Mallory Russell [00:05:41]:
Which is now the parent company of Square, it includes Square Cash, app Title and a couple of other entities, is about 11,000. I think the largest chunk of that is Square is Square. So it grew quite a lot over the. The time that I was there became large, right?
Ty Magnin [00:06:00]:
Yeah, I mean that is 10x total people, but like 4x ish. Maybe within the Square umbrella itself. Okay, and so how do you have those 40 people organized? You kind of named some of the teams, but yeah. How do you break down that org chart?
Mallory Russell [00:06:15]:
That was a really interesting challenge. I think org design is fascinating.
Ty Magnin [00:06:19]:
Um, because it is, isn't it?
Mallory Russell [00:06:21]:
Yeah. Because also you can design and you have to design an org for the, the business needs and those things can change over time and you have to like adapt to that. And it's. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. There's compromise in every way that you do it.
Ty Magnin [00:06:35]:
Totally.
Mallory Russell [00:06:36]:
What we actually did was we divided the content function into an editorial team and that was like the people creating and producing a lot of. We had some, a lot of former journalists and people who are really going deep on subject matter and audience. We had content strategists who thought about how content was used across channels to drive those business goals. And they thought about kind of larger campaigns that our team was either driving ourselves or was a part of with the rest of the marketing org. Because we also within the marketing org had an integrated marketing team, a demand or performance team, a comms team. And so content is so critical. Like we're very, very, very cross functional. And they played a huge role in making sure that what we were doing fit into everything else.
Mallory Russell [00:07:22]:
What most companies would call an SEO team. About three years ago, I changed the name of SEO to Organic Discovery and also shifted the purview of that team to not just think about organic search, but think about all the places that algorithms are used to drive organic discoverability. So if you think about social and how Those algorithms work, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, now AI, the social team then was its own kind of unit and then the web strategy team and its unit. So there was a person leading each of those functions. And then we came together as kind of like a leads group to think about overall strategy for this kind of organic owned entity and then how that fit in with the overall marketing.
Ty Magnin [00:08:03]:
So it sounds like there's this split between how much content you're producing that is in service of demand gen or integrated marketing and then there's all this strategic stuff that you have done as well. Tell us about that split and how you balance it or.
Mallory Russell [00:08:23]:
Yeah, I, it's. It's really interesting because we were both responsible like in that era we were responsible for our revenue goal within our own team because we manage channels, organic channels and own channels. And so we were responsible for a revenue goal but also the creative product we were producing was really critical to other other teams goals and how they were able to reach those. So yeah, to your point, the integrated marketing team, one of our closest partners, we provided content that was part of these kind of awareness brand campaigns to help further the goals there. Same with demand gen, different types of content, but really critical. It's kind of like a puzzle. Like we didn't say like X percent is for this team and X percent is for this team. Yeah.
Mallory Russell [00:09:04]:
Tried to start by thinking about the customers overall that we are trying to go after. Segmentation is really critical. What kinds of content each of those segments need and what the kind of message the brand is trying to get across and produce. Content that can work in multiple places in different formats and structures, but kind of these platforms that can be manipulated and flexed. So a really good example of this is like last five years we've done this tentpole report called the Future of Commerce, which is a research report, insights from small businesses and consumers about kind of what the year ahead looks like for their industry. Coming out of 2020, we wanted to kind of help business owners feel like they were on the front foot instead of the back foot. And so that's what it came out of. It was just a single report at the time.
Mallory Russell [00:09:52]:
Evolved over the last five years into this platform that yes, had reports, but also had what webinars. And we did a summit and the Future of Commerce was used in pretty much every campaign we had running. So it became an Incredibly valuable and performant asset for the team. But again like it takes all. You have to go back to kind of the foundational level of like message audience, what's going to speak to people and get our point across and is flexible enough that we can get it into all these different places. It's a puzzle that's really interesting.
Ty Magnin [00:10:25]:
So what I'm hearing is like the future of commerce sub brand. Right. So like yeah, it was a Tempo report, but then it became a larger thing that was almost like a creative solution for you to give integrated marketing and demand gen a thing that they could use. But also it's like kind of this strategic brand building thing too. Like it is a strategic content play and it's a thing that's gonna help serve them. Is that right?
Mallory Russell [00:10:54]:
Totally. And it could support the Comms team because original research is great for pitching. Um, it was su. It was super important on the organic front. I gonna butcher this. But I think we had like 118 keywords in the top three from this report because we built it over time. Right. The more you do something like this, you know, for five years.
Ty Magnin [00:11:13]:
Yeah.
Mallory Russell [00:11:14]:
Create a lot of authority around certain topics. And so it was really, really important for that. And the fact that Comms is pitching it, you're getting backlinks and that helps create space around a topic that then is somewhat audible by us.
Ty Magnin [00:11:27]:
So we've chatted with many other enterprise content leaders and one common theme we've heard is there is this tension between what campaigns or integrated marketing needs from content. And like sometimes that can be a really loud pull or need against a content team's resources and therefore they're not able to do as much of the, you know, quote unquote strategic stuff that isn't being asked of them but they feel is opportunist, you know, can help achieve the business goals. How would you advise someone to like, because like this approach that you're suggesting is like strategic and what they need.
Tim Metz [00:12:06]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:12:06]:
Can you help answer those folk?
Mallory Russell [00:12:08]:
You know, I mean, I would bet I hear. What I hear from a lot of other people in content also is that they don't get budgeted enough to really distribute the content that they're creating. So this is how you solve for that. Right. Like you become really great partners with the other parts of your marketing work, integrated marketing, performance marketing, whatever it is, and figure out how you answer what they need with something that is strategic, that creates that space around topics. Doesn't always happen like right away because they may be asking you for something Very, very specific. I think most content people feel this one really hard, which is someone comes to you and they're like, I want a blog post about 10 ways that X does this. And they're asking for an output without telling you the problem you're trying to solve or the input.
Mallory Russell [00:12:56]:
And so I think I was very, very close partners with the people who ran our integrated marketing programs. And what I would do is figure out how we could come in earlier to the briefing process, for instance, how we could potentially inform the brief or ask the right question so we get the right information out of it. And then also getting, you know, your creative team, what kind of ideas do they have? How do we make sure we can fit that into a campaign that supports the business goal? That is the job of a great content strategist to figure out how you bring those things together and create customer journeys that do support the goal.
Tim Metz [00:13:30]:
It also sounds to me like this specific report started as something relatively small and then grew over the years. Right. Is that also deliberate? So it's like don't immediately ask for something huge. Right. But just like kind of build it up over time.
Mallory Russell [00:13:44]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of piloting and then iterating over time because it allows you to understand how something might work. It gives you, if you try to go really big from the get go and things just like don't work and are like fall completely flat, it's. You're not going to get the investment again. Right. People are going to be like, well, it didn't work that last time. Even if the reason it didn't work has nothing to do with the content you produced, which could be the case. And so piloting and figuring out how you build something that's really useful was really how we went about a lot of the work that we did at Square.
Ty Magnin [00:14:17]:
So I think the report that you were talking about, Right. That to me is like an easy sell to the campaigns team. Right? To integrated marketing. It's thought leadership. It does connect back to, you know, the product probably in some cute, clever way. But there are other content campaigns that you've done that are like way more top of the funnel, more brand awareness place. So just to name a few for our audience, Square has this publication called the Bottom Line. It's kind of like a news site within that, or maybe it's a different sub brand.
Ty Magnin [00:14:47]:
You tell me, Mallory, how to think about these pieces. But there's the Way up, which is like what, how would you describe it?
Mallory Russell [00:14:54]:
It's a video podcast series with us.
Ty Magnin [00:14:57]:
And then you have. I haven't seen this one, but I guess you had something called the running. Running a restaurant is no joke.
Mallory Russell [00:15:02]:
Correct.
Ty Magnin [00:15:03]:
Which is like this comedy thing, right?
Mallory Russell [00:15:05]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:15:06]:
So like, okay, the question is how.
Tim Metz [00:15:08]:
Did you get to those? Yeah, yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:15:09]:
How do you get, how do you get the campaigns team bought into these way more, you know, top of the seemingly top of the funnel assets?
Mallory Russell [00:15:16]:
Well, I think you know, in a marketing or like where like everyone wants to do that kind of these kind of top of funnel things because they are really interesting and they provide a lot of value. It's not just that they're fun and, and creative. It's that building a brand is so essential for driving long term business results. Particularly in a space like this, like a small business space. It's incredibly competitive and almost commoditized at this point. Right. There's we've so many competitors and Square has, you know, point of sale and all these small business tools. Like there are so many others out there also doing the same thing.
Mallory Russell [00:15:49]:
So how do you differentiate and set yourself apart? Square has a long track record of I think doing that incredibly well. But because we were disruptors in the space, but then that also means people are always chasing us. So how do we kind of like zig and Zag to make sure we can create space and feel really differentiated? Like I was saying before, like if you have a great brief and you're working really closely with your partners, like there's opportunity to do this. These things are incredibly strategic. They aren't just like we wanted to work with these names. They have customer journeys laid out to get to these end results that we wanted. I think really interesting actually the Eric Wareheim stuff, which you guys should watch, it's very funny. The kind of the KPIs around are actually more around lead gen, which is interesting.
Mallory Russell [00:16:32]:
So we actually constructed a customer journey that would make sure we capture, you know, email at the right time and not just capture email but like make sure that those people are actually qualify the kind of qualified audience that we want. Because Air Eric Wareham has a, a really large following. So there are people who are going to watch this probably in the market for small business tools for their restaurant. Make sure that we are talking to the people who do. And that was really fun to work on quite honestly for like someone like me. You know, that's a, that's a challenge of how to get from something that feels very top of funnel and like move them through the funnel that way.
Tim Metz [00:17:06]:
Hmm.
Ty Magnin [00:17:07]:
And I imagine Then like the lead gen integrators campaigns team was working on that with you. Like, I guess you own that part of the team. So they're a part of that brief creation in the pitch.
Mallory Russell [00:17:18]:
Yeah. And we're working close with creative. Like it's, you know, there's a lot of back and forth.
Ty Magnin [00:17:22]:
Mellory, how does the team differ that's able to produce a series with Guy Raz, you know, high, high def video series. Right. Versus like, you know, the journalist types you probably had back in 2016 or started hiring back in 2016.
Mallory Russell [00:17:39]:
Yeah, we still have a lot of those people on the team because my team, really, really high retention. They all, they all worked on that stuff too. They just took on a different role in it. And I think that's one of the things I love being about being a content person is you do kind of get to do all these different things, right. Like there may be a project where I work on strategy. There may be another project where I come and I'm actually like line editing. You know, there may be another project where I'm writing copy sometimes in the case of like a Guy Raz, I pitched for that budget, something that had been like on my team's bucket list for years. Like years and years.
Mallory Russell [00:18:15]:
So we pitched it. Then, you know, my team, a couple of people from my team and myself, and a person, a creative director, got into a room and kind of thought about what the shape of the show would look like. Like, what's, what is the log line? Right. What kind of guests do we want to have on this? What's the big takeaway? So we sat in a very small group and thought through that and then pitched Guy. Once we kind of like got the okay, then we brought in. It still wasn't a very large team. We had people from my team who were working on kind of overall story structure, some editors who were actually building out related content. Because that is really important to anything like this.
Mallory Russell [00:18:53]:
Right. It's that kind of Thanksgiving turkey analogy where you have the, the big turkey in the middle and then you cut things off and make, you know, the sandwich and the casserole and all these things related to it. And in our case, we built intentional customer journeys that needed other types of content to support them. So we had people on my team working on all of that. And then our creative team was working with a production house to do a lot of the kind of more visual multimedia elements. And then we were, you know, kind of sitting in a room and talking through what worked, what didn't I think you do need to pull in people with a lot of different skill sets to produce something like that in my kind of POV there, because I don't really care what team they sit on. If you know how to do this thing, you're now part of our extended team on this.
Ty Magnin [00:19:37]:
You're hired.
Mallory Russell [00:19:38]:
We created this, this like mini team around this Guy Raz program and we're going to work together on everything, which I think is really fun.
Tim Metz [00:19:45]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:19:46]:
It's also like encouraging to hear that folks with kind of that written journalism background that are so often in content can continue to sort of find their way into more and more creative rooms and conversations. Like it's, it's storytelling. A lot of the principles apply.
Mallory Russell [00:20:01]:
Yeah, yeah, totally. It's. Yeah, you're still creating a story. You need people who know how to do that, who have good instincts on it. So this kind of whole idea, even when we ideate, like, I don't care what their idea comes from, like, let's get as many good brains in a room, come up with the idea. It doesn't have to come from my team, but we're going to pull in whoever we can get our hands on to make it the best thing that it can be.
Ty Magnin [00:20:22]:
Awesome. I love that attitude. If you're like most B2B content marketers, you want to lead the conversation in your industry. At Animals, we help B2B software companies do exactly that by creating standout, survey driven, state of the industry type reports that help you grow your brand authority, backlinks and pipeline in just 12 weeks. We run a process that helps uncover narratives from a unique data set packaged into a beautifully designed flagship content asset that your whole team is going to be proud of. Book a consult now at Animals Co Whitepapers and find out how to set the new benchmark for your industry. So how do you measure the results or the impact of these? You know, the Guy Raz example.
Mallory Russell [00:21:06]:
Yeah. I mean, I think every program, every campaign has its own metrics. That is one of the first things that we do. We sit down and we write the strategy or the brief that really specifically outlines what the goals are and what the KPIs for that goal is. And then that is something we definitely like run all the way up the flagpole. Right. Because we want to make sure that the CMO is comfortable with what we're spending and then what's coming back out of it and we know how to talk about it. That's the first thing that has to be agreed upon before you move forward into anything else, it's going to vary by campaign.
Mallory Russell [00:21:40]:
Something like campaign IRAs is a bit more, it is more top of funnel. Something like future of commerce actually changed year to year. And so it was really. The goals were not even consistent one year to the next necessarily. The KPIs were, we looked at the same KPIs, but the goals might change based on marketing strategy. So one year it might be very awareness focused. The next year it may be completely focused on driving leads and MQLs into the funnel, which was always really fun because it meant we got to change up the whole, the whole thing, the content we were producing, the way we're getting people from one thing to the next. So I think campaign wise, it's incredibly dependent on what the overall marketing strategy is.
Mallory Russell [00:22:19]:
And then you look at the overall program, right. To understand your investment in a team like mine and what you should be investing it in it for the next year and how it's helping drive in, you know, overall business. In this case, you know, kind of profit, net profit from acquisition.
Ty Magnin [00:22:35]:
And so is Your team largely KPI'd with MQLs through organic channels or how are you measured?
Mallory Russell [00:22:42]:
Again, it's changed over time. I mean, as it does because your marketing strategy is going to change your business challenges you're trying to solve are going to change. Particularly like if you think about the space of time I worked at Square, we have this nice chunk in the middle that's the pandemic, which really shifted a lot of things. Right. And so there was a lot of change in how we were measuring things. For the, a good majority of the time I was responsible for reporting on a profit metric like the other people who reported into the cmo, like our performance team, like our integrated marketing team. But with that said, like, you have to have a lot of KPIs related to that because particularly with content and particularly if you're going after a B2B audience, they're not probably converting after looking at one article. And we know this about procedure, B2B.
Ty Magnin [00:23:31]:
Audiences, like seven touches or I don't know, it's probably more than that now.
Mallory Russell [00:23:34]:
Yeah, you need a lot of touches sometimes like, you know, purchasing a point of sale, depending on your business size might take a very long time. And then once you're in that window of like I'm going to do this, like it's short. We had to look at a lot of other KPIs to understand how all of it was working. We had to really understand how analytics worked. And also how, like, our attribution models worked. I think that's something that, and I've worked with a lot of people. Like, not every content person has spent enough time probably looking at the attribution models within their team to understand how that model is taking content into account. And it's really, really critical traffic.
Mallory Russell [00:24:12]:
It's not that it's important, but it's a good indication of what's coming in so you can understand why you know what's coming out the end of the funnel. Leads were really important just because we understood how critical content is in driving leads into sales or even into self onboard. So leads were really important and we looked a lot at engagement because in my view, that is the actual thing that differentiates content from a lot of other things. Right. Ads in particular is winning hearts and minds. And the way you look at that is like, how engaged are people in what they're looking at.
Ty Magnin [00:24:46]:
Can you take me back to that point you made around this pitfall of not. How did you put it? Like, content marketers aren't paying enough attention to the attribution models that they're being held to?
Mallory Russell [00:24:57]:
Yeah, I mean, I, I talk, I talk with a lot of content people and I, I talk with a lot of marketing teams about, you know, how they think about content. And I always ask, like, how do you measure it? I mean, it would shock a lot of people. How many? Maybe it wouldn't. How many people I talked to that they were like, oh, you know, we have some, like, metrics for the blog, but we don't really, we don't really look at them.
Ty Magnin [00:25:17]:
Yikes. I would just, just to say, like, if that is you, you don't have to raise your hand and tell everybody, but, like, you're in the danger zone.
Mallory Russell [00:25:25]:
Right.
Ty Magnin [00:25:25]:
Like, you are in a place where at some point someone's going to look at you and think, like, what are they producing?
Mallory Russell [00:25:33]:
Right.
Ty Magnin [00:25:33]:
What is the ROI on this person, this team, this effort?
Mallory Russell [00:25:36]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:25:37]:
And so, like, solve that thing. Go talk to your cfo. Go talk to someone that can help you solve it if you don't have the chops to do it yourself. Just a little PSA for, For anyone out there that's not measuring things.
Mallory Russell [00:25:49]:
Yeah. So I, I think I talked to a lot of people, said that. And then very few content people I talk to, like, really understand how content touch points play into the overall kind of attribution model within their marketing Org. And I was that person too. When I started at Square, I really had to dig in pretty Deep. It's a very data centric organization. I had to dig in pretty deep to understand what was going on, how it was impacting things. And I think the other thing, I mean, everyone says content measurement is hard.
Mallory Russell [00:26:18]:
It is to an extent. I think we've also overcomplicated it a little bit. We've spent so much time trying to think about how we justify spend for content, which I know a lot of people are in that situation, that I think we've also thought about it in some cases in ways that aren't helpful in the long term. Like, I hear a lot of people talking about content as a channel. It's not, you know, there are, there are channels that use content, but if you think about it as a channel and if you say we're going to award last touch attribution to this piece of content, you're. You're taking it away from an actual channel and then you're in competition. Right. Often with SEO is where I think a lot of tension can sometimes come in.
Mallory Russell [00:27:00]:
If you have a content team and an SEO team, you're splitting something that's actually shared. Like the sup needs the content to drive things through the channel. Same with social, same with all these other things. I think it's been overcomplicated a bit. I think we should understand how much to spend on content, but not that content needs to be spent on at all. People don't question the need for creative to exist.
Ty Magnin [00:27:23]:
Right.
Mallory Russell [00:27:23]:
For ads. So content's just the other side of that. You have to do both. You just have to understand how this is used in this one.
Ty Magnin [00:27:30]:
And so in that model, does content get like a slice of the attribution? It's like, you know, sort of the assist or how do you think of that or how do you position that to.
Mallory Russell [00:27:40]:
Well, I think that is going to very much depend on what organization you're in and what moment in time you are in. So that's very. That varied in my time at Square, we moved it. We changed the amount of pie it was getting over time to align with how our marketing evolved. And so I think that's the other piece is it's not stagnant.
Ty Magnin [00:28:01]:
Has that shifted at all with the emergence of Gen AI at Square?
Mallory Russell [00:28:04]:
I don't, you know, it did. I don't know if I was. I. We were thinking about it that way. But yeah, the timelines do line up that kind of changes for content. It's a really interesting one.
Tim Metz [00:28:14]:
I want to talk more about that. It's like Ty's favorite topic is metrics and attribution, but my favorite topic is AI. I have actually been saying we need to change like head of SEO in the agency to like head of algorithms or something like that. So I love that you said that you changed your, your team. So let, let's start there. Like, how do you. What was your thinking there and then like, what have you seen from making that change?
Mallory Russell [00:28:35]:
My thinking there, and this is before chatgpt kind of like blew everything up. Was that the Town Square blog? When I started, like search traffic was like 10% over the first year. We put so much time in that it accounted for 50% and we saw like 4, 400, 400% increase in traffic. So like we were getting a lot of traffic and acquisition in through organic search, which was fantastic. Over the course of a few years though, it started to make me feel uncomfortable in the same way that like, if you only invested in one stock in your portfolio, like you better diversify. You're at the whim and we were, you're at the whim of, you know, Google changing an algorithm. You never know what's going to happen, right? So like your traffic could tank one day and like you're already behind in trying to make it up. So my actual thinking was I think we need to think more broadly about organic channels that can drive in.
Mallory Russell [00:29:30]:
And really like top of mind for me is like how we crack the code on YouTube. Because at the time, I think there's more understanding of it now, but it was like kind of a black box, the algorithm and like how you could, you know, optimize for it. But Square has this very amazing, amazing large library of video content. So I was thinking about that, I was thinking about Amazon. Reddit was really kind of emerging like there they hadn't done the deal yet between Google and Reddit, but it was emerging as this like place where people are really going to get answers here. How do we start to think about that? So it was really just, let's diversify and make sure that if something changes that we have other places we're getting traffic from from. Obviously that putting us in a great spot when chatgpt entered the equation to start, or at least that because the team was already thinking about experimentation and innovation in a different way than they had before. They were still thinking about organic search.
Mallory Russell [00:30:26]:
Very important still. But there was also a lot of space to like test new things out with a lot without fear of failure. And so I think that part is the most critical thing with all of this is like this is all new territory. How do we get people thinking in a way that gets them to move quickly, to not feel familiar, to try things out that feel a little risky?
Tim Metz [00:30:48]:
Yeah, I love that because there's so many places where. And I've also always in this space been thinking about LinkedIn, for example. It's also an algorithm. Right. It's like thinking about the algorithm and kind of like having that experimentation mindset. I think that's awesome. And what happened then, like, chatgpt came, of course. And I mean, we all have our own, I guess, ChatGPT moment stories, but I think super interested, like, how that played out for you in such a big org.
Tim Metz [00:31:09]:
And like, how did you bring it into the team? And like, how are people using it? How are they not allowed to use it like this? It's just such a different level to manage that for at Square, I would think.
Mallory Russell [00:31:18]:
Yeah, I mean, ChatGPT kind of exploded onto the scene. And then of course, it's like the first thing every single person saying to you is like, we should create all our content through this.
Ty Magnin [00:31:27]:
Now write me a blog post on.
Mallory Russell [00:31:29]:
Xyz, you know, you know, people sending us, like, social posts they had done through it, and we were, like, horrified, like, no, there is value to it, but, like, that is not the value. And so I think with our SEO team, we were like, go, just start experimenting, like, figure out, like, these are kind of the channels. But I'm not as concerned about, like, which channels you go after as. As long as you're trying to find new things to do with. With AI and, and ChatGPT in particular and gen AI. It took a breath because I was very concerned about people pushing us to do more, like, just produce more content. And I'm on the record on this in a number of places. Like, I think there's too much content in the world.
Mallory Russell [00:32:10]:
There's so much. Right. And like, it's very easy for content teams to get pushed into producing more content that has no distribution, that has no real value to the brand. So when we produce content, it has to be really purposeful. And if we're going to use these new tools to do that, that has to be really purposeful, too. So I sat down with some of our partners, actually, and just started thinking about the most useful things we could get out of tools that use AI and landed in a place where, at least to begin with, it was like content marketing and content management, especially when you have a really established program like Square does, because it was there before I started. So it's you know, 10 plus years old. We have an incredibly large library of content.
Mallory Russell [00:32:53]:
The management of a library of content that large isn't so time consuming. Right. So my first thought was like, how do we give the team time back from these things that take a lot of time, but it could be working on things that are more interesting and really need a human to do it. Right. We worked with Notch, we did a lot of measurement with them and they have some tools that would allow us to understand performance and then make recommendations on like how we optimize using AI. And so that was the first place we started was just let's do a quick test of let's take some super low performers and some super high performers and implement these recommendations. And they weren't based on SEO. These were really based on driving more search traffic.
Mallory Russell [00:33:39]:
It was really based on engagement. And we immediately saw increases engagement in like every piece of content. The second one that we keyed in on was atomization. Really super time consuming. Again, I worked at a lot of places where I was like the only content marketer and you'd be producing a report and like writing like 25 pieces of social copy and seven emails and all this stuff. How do you use AI to maybe like give you. And most of it's like repeated, right. You're writing the same kind of lines over and over and over again.
Mallory Russell [00:34:09]:
Use AI to kind of get a head start on that and use an editor to go through and, and make it great. And then the third was verticalization or personalization in our case. Like Square serves a lot of different types of businesses and so how do we maybe have a core piece of content that we then verticalize by industry and see how that works. So those were kind of the places we started. That was within the content team. What I tasked the kind of organic discovery team with is like, how do we think about it as an acquisition channel in and of itself, which they kind of started to work on. Both those teams have to work together on all of those things. But like it helped to have one team think about one space and another space just so we could keep moving.
Ty Magnin [00:34:54]:
Nice.
Tim Metz [00:34:55]:
That's awesome.
Ty Magnin [00:34:55]:
Where do you think it's all heading? Like, what do you, what do you predict a year, two years from now in terms of how content teams evolve?
Mallory Russell [00:35:03]:
Okay. As like doom and gloom as content people were when Gen AI came out?
Ty Magnin [00:35:08]:
Yeah.
Mallory Russell [00:35:09]:
I think AI is going to be a fantastic thing to happen to content marketers in the same way it's a fantastic thing to happen to brand marketers. Because if the LLMs are taking in content and like a lot of people are using it to produce new, more content, it's just the same thing over and over and over again. Right. You're getting very similar things being produced, but it also shows you where the white, like the kind of white space, the open space exists to come out with something truly unique. Thought leadership becomes incredibly important. Again, original research becomes important. Your brand understanding your brand values and matching that with kind of actions and content critical. And I think that's a lot of what content marketers want to do.
Ty Magnin [00:35:55]:
Totally.
Mallory Russell [00:35:56]:
They want to do things kind of mid top, not that they don't want to do the things at the bottom. Those are really important for the kind of customer journey. But I think, you know, the whole space has been so focused on performance that a lot of time has been spent down here producing things that like, you know, you're looking for a search term that really indicates someone's ready to buy, producing content around that. I think AI opens up the top because if you're going to rank for AI, you don't rank in AI, you get mentions. Right. So it's a different muscle to use and one that I think all of us love using. I think it's probably one of the best things to happen for, for content marketers.
Ty Magnin [00:36:32]:
Look at that.
Tim Metz [00:36:33]:
Nice.
Ty Magnin [00:36:33]:
I think we have to, we have to wrap it there on a high note.
Tim Metz [00:36:37]:
Exactly.
Ty Magnin [00:36:38]:
From Mallory Russell. So Mallory, I know right now you're kind of taking a pause. Yes. Doing some fractional work. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about that and maybe where they can follow along with your journey?
Mallory Russell [00:36:49]:
Totally. Yeah. I racked up my time at Square after eight and a half years, I'm taking a moment to breathe. Like I mentioned at the top, I'm moving with my family, but I am doing some fractional work and also open to full time roles. But I, I'm a, I'm a learner. I like love to learn. That's why I stayed at Squareso for so long. I got to tackle so many different interesting challenges and really try out new things.
Mallory Russell [00:37:13]:
And so yeah, looking forward to doing some fractional work and like learning about different industries and different phases of companies and maybe help people build some new content muscles. I'm on LinkedIn, just Alarie Russell and, and I also have a website which is malloryarussell. Com.
Ty Magnin [00:37:28]:
Awesome. Well, I'm already building some new content muscles just learning from you, so thanks for participating. Thanks for hanging out with us for a little while. It's Great to have you.
Mallory Russell [00:37:36]:
Thank you so much.
Tim Metz [00:37:37]:
Thanks Mallory.
Mallory Russell [00:37:39]:
Woo.
Ty Magnin [00:37:40]:
Another stimulating conversation. I mean, man, what like a dream journey Mallory has had, you know, from first content marketer into like building this team of 40 and like adding it piece by piece over eight years, it's impressive. And then also doing these like big shiny, you know, Brandy content projects. I just think that's quite incredible and inspiring and like a little bit of the dream for many B2B SaaS marketers. So just want to recognize that. My biggest learning today was like we've been chatting about this tension between a service oriented content team and a strategic content team, right? One of them is like at the beck and call in and is controlled by other teams and like, you know, content marketers don't always love that. And the other, the strategic one is like typically what, what teams are like fighting towards. But like some of this is ego, right? And some of this is just the way that you collaborate and kind of like how you establish the role of content at the organization.
Ty Magnin [00:38:40]:
And what Mallory came with today was like, uh, I mean she's obviously someone that has had success doing what looks like strategic content, you know, with these like high level brand plays. But her perspective and her approach is like, I just want to be really involved in the early stages with my demand gen or integrated marketing counterparts and then I want to like have my hand in the brief to shape up something that is really interesting and like creative but the campaigns or integrated marketing team can use. So I think that was really inspiring to see and is kind of my big aha moment from today.
Tim Metz [00:39:20]:
Nice. Yeah, I mean there were so many things. Like I was, I had this little, little things that stood out to me. Like maybe this is me not having worked on such big content projects, but I like that. When we started talking about Guy Raz, the first thing she almost said, I think was like mapping out customer journeys of like how this is going to actually work. And I was like, oh yeah, like should be doing that much more often also, even at a smaller scale, like just thinking about like, okay, how's this piece going to lead to this and lead to this and how's, how's that going to generate the lead? So I thought that's very thoughtful. That's kind of the first thing. I also liked the iteration kind of came through because she talked about this report, the future of commerce, how that kind of iterated on itself.
Tim Metz [00:39:56]:
But then I also like that with the guy razing, it also came out like there was a step before that. It's not like, from nothing to like, oh, let's get Guy Raz. It's like just to put it in perspective because you could see something like that and it's like, oh, wow, they did this big bang. But it's like, no, it's something that, like, she's been thinking about for years. There were little steps towards that. So I think that's also kind of a realism check that you shouldn't, you know, go from nothing to something like that out of nowhere.
Ty Magnin [00:40:18]:
Well, in that same theme, Tim, about iteration, like it occurred or recurred around her org structure, right? Like, she, it sounds like she had changed it many times along the way. Same thing with her goals, same thing on attribution. Like, you might set these things for now and they're going to be a little imperfect, they're going to fall out of perfection. And like, your job is to evolve with the times, to evolve with the business and change these, you know, core structures as necessary. So, yeah, I, I, I think you're right. Like, when you see someone like Mallory that's been in a company through a lot of growth, through a lot of change for a long period of time, eight and a half years, it's interesting to see that longer perspective. Right. And how things do get reset along the way.
Tim Metz [00:41:04]:
I guess the thing we didn't get into, which I also, I'm sure is a big story there is, like, how she went, like, how her personal journey, developing herself, going from like, being the only contributor to managing like more than 40 people plus all the stakeholders and whatever. Like, there's, there must be a lot.
Ty Magnin [00:41:19]:
Of, a lot of learning along the way.
Tim Metz [00:41:21]:
Learning? Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:41:21]:
Do you have any more learnings you want to, you know, share with the audience?
Tim Metz [00:41:25]:
I just think it's really good to think about algorithms almost as a, as a, as a capability and SEO just being an algorithm. So that to have a team or a person who's thinking about how can we optimize for algorithms, right? And because I think if you have that mindset, then exactly what you described happens. It's like then when a new algorithm, new channel that is based on algorithms becomes important, that team is kind of ready and thinks of itself as having to dive into that instead of the team then thinking, we are the SEO team, we have nothing to do with this. Right. I think that's, I think that's super interesting.
Ty Magnin [00:41:57]:
Yeah, it is interesting, right? Like, you sort of have your channel focused side of content. Typically, that's SEO, right. In a larger org, maybe you do have some folks that Are like, social is kind of this way. And then you have, like, your traditional content team, which is focused on, like, the fuel for the engine. You know, they should know enough about these channels, maybe one or two, but they don't, like, own the channel. And so you see, like, a real split here and a need maybe not to focus the channel team on just SEO, but, like, more broadly about different algorithms.
Tim Metz [00:42:32]:
Yeah. Or you could have them exist alongside each other, but a team or a person who views themself as a specialist in figuring out how the algorithm works and how to stay up to date on the algorithm changes and things like that, that's essentially what a lot of SEOs do. Right. But that also in a way applies to LinkedIn. For example, like, as you see LinkedIn become more important, like whether your content surfaces also has a lot to do with the LinkedIn algorithm. Right. And so if you have people who think about algorithms, they might be able to transfer those kind of skills or that mentality, which he also kind of said, it's a lot of experimentation to another channel. Whereas if they see themselves just stuck in this channel, they're not going to look at LinkedIn and say, oh, let me start experimenting with the LinkedIn algorithm.
Tim Metz [00:43:08]:
Whereas probably there's a lot of similarities or a lot of, like, similar tests to run to figure out how it works. Right. So I think that's an interesting discipline or skill to think about.
Ty Magnin [00:43:18]:
I dig it, I dig it. And that's actually an interesting one for people to be trying on as it pertains to making this pivot from SEO towards aeo. Right. And thinking about, how do you now win at the LLM? It's not exactly an algorithm, but, like, you know, how do you start ranking or showing up there?
Tim Metz [00:43:35]:
Yeah. And that's kind of what she also said. I think that that team kind of almost naturally started doing that immediately because they were like, yeah, that's our job, right? To figure out how this new platform works. So, yeah, I think that's a cool, cool approach, a cool mindset shift.
Ty Magnin [00:43:48]:
Same here. Let's wrap it here. Thanks for sticking around for another episode of the Animals podcast. We'll see you next week.
Tim Metz [00:43:55]:
Yeah, see you next week. Bye. Bye.
